Across the VINDICO business we get to see a lot of video usage data running through our system. Mostly we aren’t at liberty to share this but it can help us point out to clients (advertisers and/or publishers alike) some interesting trends that they might want to run an official study on.

A recent one of these was focused on mid-roll, an ad scheduled to run in the middle of online video content. Some of the final numbers turned out to be pretty staggering, just over 93% of all mid-rolls were viewed to completion. These numbers were run across a multitude of publishers, on behalf of an FMCG company, and always against long-form content (minimum of 15 minutes to qualify as long-form).

So, should we only be buying mid-rolls from now?

Amongst the headlines there were some extra nuggets of information. Firstly, 85% of all pre-rolls were viewed to completion, (this could explain why the mid-roll number was higher as those users were already committed to the show); secondly, 83% of all post-rolls were viewed to completion, which tells us that users choosing to watch long form video are prepared to watch to completion – ads and all. Does this mean that engagement should replace click-through rate as the measurement of choice? If the client understands the potential of their advertising it also stands to reason that they wouldn’t always want the user to click – imagine if everyone in the UK clicked on the John Lewis Christmas ad before the end, it wouldn’t have quite the same meaning.

Engagement has always been a key metric but it seems there is a groundswell of opinion in its favour at the moment and I am firmly in that camp. User engagement with the media of choice, and the chance to engage a viewer with your TV/Video ad is a powerful one, one that I think we should encourage brands and agencies to explore and to focus on.

People are happy to watch ads in their video streams when they have elected to watch long-form content, it’s time we worked out how to encourage that engagement and maximise it, thereby (hopefully) also increasing the viewing pleasure. It may be that the industry needs to focus on the adoption of standards; certainly VAST 2.0 would allow agencies and publishers to trade on engagement and ad view-through. The agencies might only pay for users who stayed over 25% of the ad, meanwhile publishers might charge a premium for advertisers who routinely lost users before 50% of the ad, in an attempt to encourage better creative.

Whichever way we look at it, the users are engaged and we are getting a lot of data. Let’s sift through it properly and start spending time and money on getting the future of video right, from all perspectives.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in M&M Global